When Ronald Reagan's career in show business came to an end, he was hired to impersonate, first, a California governor and then an American president who would reduce taxes for his employers, the Southern and Western New Rich, much of whose money came from the defense industries. There is nothing unusual about this arrangement. All recent presidents have had their price-tags.

Forty percent of all Americans and 45 percent of Christians believe that the world will end, as the Bible predicts, in a battle at Armageddon between Jesus and the Antichrist, according to a new Newsweek Poll on prophecy. Fully, 71 percent of Evangelical Protestants, but only 28 percent of non-Evangelical Protestants and 18 percent of Catholics share that view…

In the poll, large majorities of believers in the second coming of Christ believe that current events such as natural disasters (83%), epidemics like AIDS and Ebola (66%) and outbreaks of violence like shootings (62%), are a sign that it will happen soon. An overwhelming majority of believers in a second coming (95%) believe that, under such circumstances, it is important to get right with God and a majority (65%) think it is important to convert non-Christians. However, less than half of believers (42%) think that converting people to the Christian faith hastens the return of Jesus to Earth. Among all

of those surveyed, 57 percent expect that people will be divided between heaven and hell after the world ends. An even larger majority (68%) expect that they will be going to heaven…

22 Percent of Americans Think Know the World Will End in Their Lifetime… The United States is pretty well prepared to deal, with 22 percent of respondents clued in to the obvious truth that Big Government doesn't want you to know. This puts us on par with our oldest ally, Turkey, and way ahead of Great Britain, where only 8 percent of adults believe the world was hanging around just long enough for them to be born before it ended.

The country most caught off-guard by the End Times, which almost certainly will occur sooner rather than later, will probably be France, where only 6 percent of residents believe Armageddon will take place within the next few decades.

On 20 September 1970, an evangelical Christian, George Otis, and several like-minded folk visited Reagan when he was governor of California. They spoke rapturously of Rapture (the transporting of believers to heaven at the Second Coming of Christ. svh) Then, according to Otis, they all joined hands in prayer and Otis prophesied Reagan’s coming election to the presidency. According to Otis (‘Visit with a King’) Reagan’s arms ‘shook and pulsated’ during this prophecy. The next summer (29 June 1971) Reagan asked Billy Graham to address the California legislature; afterwards, at lunch, Reagan asked Graham, ‘Well, do you believe that Jesus Christ is coming soon, and what are the signs of his coming if that is the case?’ Graham did not beat about this burning bush. ‘The indication’, he said, ‘that Jesus Christ is at the very door.’

Later, in 1971, Governor Reagan attended a dinner where he sat next to James Mills, the president of California state senate. Mills was so impressed by the dinner conversation that he wrote it all down immediately afterwards, but published it much later (San Diego Magazine, August 1985), pro bono publico, if a bit late.

After the main course, the lights dimmed and flaming bowls of cherries jubilee were served. No doubt inspired by the darkness and the flames, Reagan suddenly asked, out of right field, if Mills had read ‘the fierce Old Testament prophet Ezekiel.’ Mills allowed that he had (after all, you don’t get in the California state senate if you say no); as it turned out, he did know Ezekiel. Then, ‘with firelit intensity’, Reagan began to talk about how Libya had now gone Communist, just as Ezekiel had foretold, and ‘that’s a sign that the day of Armageddon isn’t far off.’

Ook over het lot van Libië had de Amerikaanse president een rotsvaste mening toen hij tegenover Mills verklaarde ‘that everything hasn’t fallen into place yet. But there is only that one thing left that has to happen. The Reds have to take over Ethiopia.’ En dat was tot zijn grote opluchting onvermijdelijk, want ‘It’s necessary to fulfill the prophecy that Ethiopia will be one of the ungodly nations that go against Israel.’ De door Heijne en Thompson als een ‘safe pair of hands’ gepresenteerdeReagan vervolgde met de zienswijze dat:

All of the other prophecies that had to be fulfilled before Armageddon have come to pass. In the thirty-eight chapter of Ezekiel it says God will takes the children of Israel from among the heathen when they’d been scattered and will gather them again in the promised land. That has finally come about after 2,000 years. For the first time ever, everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ.

Vidal merkt tevens op dat:

During the presidential race of 1980, Reagan told Jim Bakker of the PTL network: ‘We may be the generation that sees Armageddon,’ while a writer for the New York Times reported that Reagan (1980) told a Jewish group that ‘Israel is the only stable democracy we can rely on as a spot where Armageddon could come.’

The nation had been chosen to redeem mankind, but the question of who constituted that nation exactly, and what ought to be done to, or with, those unlucky enough not to belong to it, would roil (in beroering brengen. svh)the country for centuries. Divine election; millenarian hopes snatched from the storms of tribulation; trust that the colonists had a providential destiny; a belief that the rest of the world ought to be grateful: this ideological compound continues down throughout American history, tying together people of many different persuasions… In 1878, the elderly Emerson declared that ‘this country, the last found, is the great charity of God to the human race.’ Accepting the Progressive Party nomination in 1912 — the theme song was ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ — Theodore Roosevelt closed his speech with the words ‘We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord.’ There is surely a straight line connecting TR (as well as his victorious rival that year, the still more fervent Christian Woodrow Wilson) with the George W. Bush who declared in his First Inaugural that God’s ‘purpose is achieved in our duty’ and that ‘an angel still rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm.’

Bush explained to French Pres. Chirac that the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Mid-East and must be defeated. The revelation this month in GQ Magazine that Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary embellished top-secret wartime memos with quotations from the Bible prompts a question. Why did he believe he could influence President Bush by that means?

The answer may lie in an alarming story about George Bush's Christian millenarian beliefs that has yet to come to light.

In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France's President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated.

In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:

‘And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.’

Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:

‘This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people's enemies before a New Age begins.’

The story of the conversation emerged only because the Élysée Palace, baffled by Bush's words, sought advice from Thomas Romer, a professor of theology at the University of Lausanne. Four years later, Romer gave an account in the September 2007 issue of the university's review, Allez savoir. The article apparently went unnoticed, although it was referred to in a French newspaper.

One of Reagan’s personae, the one that exited most of his political base, sounded like Theodore Roosevelt on San Juan Hill. This was the Reagan of the rollback, the Manichaean Reagan who hailed the Nicaraguan contras as ‘the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers’: whose eponymous Doctrine enjoyed aid of all kinds to anticommunist fighters no matter what their persuasion, including a Salvadoran government that deployed death squads against priests, left-wing activists, and plain peasants; whose 1985 State of the Union Address proclaimed: ‘We must not brake faith with those who are risking their lives… on every continent, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua… to defy Soviet aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth.’ This was the Reagan who spent more on the military in peacetime than any previous American president, driving the country into unprecedented debt.

Ronald Reagan's harsh drug policies not only led to exploding prisons, they blocked expansion of syringe exchange programs and other harm reduction policies that could have prevented hundreds of thousands of people from contracting HIV and dying from AIDS.

While Ronald and Nancy Reagan were demonizing people who use drugs at home, their foreign policy objectives included funding the Contras in Nicaragua who played a role in flooding Los Angeles and other cities in the United States with crack cocaine…

While Nancy and Ronald Reagan are no longer with us physically, the public hysteria that they whipped up and the draconian, zero-tolerance drug policies that were implemented in the 1980s, are still alive and kicking today.

A three-judge panel Friday convicted former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt of genocide, saying his military regime used ‘extreme terror’ in an effort to wipe out a Mayan minority ethnic group in the early 1980s.

In a packed courtroom in Guatemala City, Judge Yassmin Barrios said investigators had proven that the regime led by Rios Montt, who is 86, used starvation, mass homicide, dislocation, rape and aerial bombardment as tactics to exterminate the Ixil minority, which it believed to harbor leftist guerrillas.

Barrios gave Rios Montt a 50-year jail term for genocide and an additional 30 years for crimes against humanity...

At the time of Rios Montt’s rule, the United States was engaged in proxy war across Central America in an effort to turn back Cuban-backed leftists in the region. In December 1982, President Ronald Reagan said after meeting with Rios Montt in Honduras that the Guatemalan dictator got a ‘bum rap’ (onterecht werd beschuldigd. svh) as a human rights violator.

The first month of the genocide trial of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt has elicited chilling testimony from Mayan survivors who – as children – watched their families slaughtered by a right-wing military that was supported and supplied by U.S. President Ronald Reagan.

As the New York Times reported on Monday, ‘In the tortured logic of military planning documents conceived under Mr. Ríos Montt’s 17-month rule during 1982 and 1983, the entire Mayan Ixil population was a military target, children included. Officers wrote that the leftist guerrillas fighting the government had succeeded in indoctrinating the impoverished Ixils and reached “100 percent support.’”

So, everyone was targeted in these scorched-earth campaigns that eradicated more than 600 Indian villages in the Guatemalan highlands. But this genocide was not simply the result of a twisted anticommunist ideology that dominated the Guatemalan military and political elites. This genocide also was endorsed (gesteund) by the Reagan administration.

A document that I discovered recently in the archives of the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, revealed that Reagan and his national security team in 1981 agreed to supply military aid to the brutal right-wing regime in Guatemala to pursue the goal of exterminating not only ‘Marxist guerrillas’ but people associated with their ‘civilian support mechanisms.’

This supportive attitude toward the Guatemalan regime’s brutality took shape in spring 1981 as President Reagan sought to ease human-rights restrictions on military aid to Guatemala that had been imposed by President Jimmy Carter and the Democratic-controlled Congress in the late 1970s.

As part of that relaxation effort, Reagan’s State Department ‘advised our Central American embassies that it has been studying ways to restore a closer, cooperative relationship with Guatemala,’ according to a White House ‘Situation Room Checklist’ dated April 8, 1981. The document added:

‘State believes a number of changes have occurred which could make Guatemalan leaders more receptive to a new U.S. initiative: the Guatemalans view the new administration as more sympathetic to their problems [and] they are less suspect of the U.S. role in El Salvador,’ where the Reagan administration was expanding support for another right-wing regime infamous for slaughtering its political opponents, including Catholic clergy.

‘State has concluded that any attempt to reestablish a dialogue [with Guatemala] would require some initial, condition-free demonstration of our goodwill. However, this could not include military sales which would provoke serious U.S. public and congressional criticism. State will undertake a series of confidence building measures, free of preconditions, which minimize potential conflict with existing legislation.’

The ‘checklist’ added that the State Department ‘has also decided that the administration should engage the Guatemalan government at the highest level in a dialogue on our bilateral relations and the initiatives we can take together to improve them. Secretary [of State Alexander] Haig has designated [retired] General Vernon Walters as his personal emissary to initiate this process with President [Fernando Romeo] Lucas [Garcia].’

‘If Lucas is prepared to give assurances that he will take steps to halt government involvement in the indiscriminate killing of political opponents and to foster a climate conducive to a viable electoral process, the U.S. will be prepared to approve some military sales immediately.’

But the operative word in that paragraph was ‘indiscriminate.’ The Reagan administration expressed no problem with killing civilians if they were considered supporters of the guerrillas who had been fighting against the country’s ruling oligarchs and generals since the 1950s when the CIA organized the overthrow of Guatemala’s reformist President Jacobo Arbenz.

Sympathy for the Generals

The distinction was spelled out in ‘Talking Points’ for Walters to deliver in a face-to-face meeting with General Lucas. As edited inside the White House in April 1981, the ‘Talking Points’ read: ‘The President and Secretary Haig have designated me [Walters] as [their] personal emissary to discuss bilateral relations on an urgent basis.

Both the President and the Secretary recognize that your country is engaged in a war with Marxist guerrillas. We are deeply concerned about externally supported Marxist subversion in Guatemala and other countries in the region. As you are aware, we have already taken steps to assist Honduras and El Salvador resist this aggression.

The Secretary has sent me here to see if we can work out a way to provide material assistance to your government… We have minimized negative public statements by US officials on the situation in Guatemala… We have arranged for the Commerce Department to take steps that will permit the sale of $3 million worth of military trucks and Jeeps to the Guatemalan army…

With your concurrence, we propose to provide you and any officers you might designate an intelligence briefing on regional developments from our perspective. Our desire, however, is to go substantially beyond the steps I have just outlined. We wish to reestablish our traditional military supply and training relationship as soon as possible.

As we are both aware, this has not yet been feasible because of our internal political and legal constraints relating to the use by some elements of your security forces of deliberate and indiscriminate killing of persons not involved with the guerrilla forces or their civilian support mechanisms. I am not referring here to the regrettable but inevitable death of innocents though error in combat situations, but to what appears to us a calculated use of terror to immobilize non politicized people or potential opponents…

If you could give me your assurance that you will take steps to halt official involvement in the killing of persons not involved with the guerrilla forces or their civilian support mechanism … we would be in a much stronger position to defend successfully with the Congress a decision to begin to resume our military supply relationship with your government.’

In other words, though the ‘talking points’ were framed as an appeal to reduce the ‘indiscriminate’ slaughter of ‘non politicized people,’ they amounted to an acceptance of scorched-earth tactics against people involved with the guerrillas and ‘their civilian support mechanisms.’ The way that played out in Guatemala — as in nearby El Salvador — was the massacring of peasants in regions considered sympathetic to leftist insurgents.

The newly discovered documents — and other records declassified in the late 1990s — make clear that Reagan and his administration were well aware of the butchery underway in Guatemala and elsewhere in Central America.

According to one ‘secret’ cable also from April 1981 — and declassified in the 1990s — the CIA was confirming Guatemalan government massacres even as Reagan was moving to loosen the military aid ban. On April 17, 1981, a CIA cable described an army massacre at Cocob, near Nebaj in the Ixil Indian territory, because the population was believed to support leftist guerrillas.

A CIA source reported that ‘the social population appeared to fully support the guerrillas’ and ‘the soldiers were forced to fire at anything that moved.’ The CIA cable added that ‘the Guatemalan authorities admitted that “many civilians” were killed in Cocob, many of whom undoubtedly were non-combatants.’ [Many of the Guatemalan documents declassified in the 1990s can be found at the National Security Archive’s Web site.]

Dispatching Walters

In May 1981, despite the ongoing atrocities, Reagan dispatched Walters to tell the Guatemalan leaders that the new U.S. administration wanted to lift the human rights embargoes on military equipment that Carter and Congress had imposed.

The ‘Talking Points’ also put the Reagan administration in line with the fiercely anticommunist regimes elsewhere in Latin America, where right-wing ‘death squads’ operated with impunity liquidating not only armed guerrillas but civilians who were judged sympathetic to left-wing causes like demanding greater economic equality and social justice.

Despite his aw-shucks style (joviale. svh), Reagan found virtually every anticommunist action justified, no matter how brutal. From his eight years in the White House, there is no historical indication that he was morally troubled by the bloodbath and even genocide that occurred in Central America while he was shipping hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to the implicated forces.

The death toll was staggering — an estimated 70,000 or more political killings in El Salvador, possibly 20,000 slain from the Contra war in Nicaragua, about 200 political ‘disappearances’ in Honduras and some 100,000 people eliminated during a resurgence of political violence in Guatemala. The one consistent element in these slaughters was the overarching Cold War rationalization, emanating in large part from Ronald Reagan’s White House.

Despite their claims to the contrary, the evidence is now overwhelming that Reagan and his advisers knew the extraordinary brutality going on in Guatemala and elsewhere, based on their own internal documents.

According to a State Department cable on Oct. 5, 1981, when Guatemalan leaders met again with Walters, they left no doubt about their plans. The cable said Gen. Lucas ‘made clear that his government will continue as before — that the repression will continue. He reiterated his belief that the repression is working and that the guerrilla threat will be successfully routed.’

Human rights groups saw the same picture. The Inter-American Human Rights Commission released a report on Oct. 15, 1981, blaming the Guatemalan government for ‘thousands of illegal executions.’ [Washington Post, Oct. 16, 1981]

But the Reagan administration was set on whitewashing the ugly scene. A State Department ‘white paper,’ released in December 1981, blamed the violence on leftist ‘extremist groups’ and their ‘terrorist methods’ prompted and supported by Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

What the documents from the Reagan Library make clear is that the administration was not simply struggling ineffectively to rein in these massacres — as the U.S. press corps typically reported — but was fully onboard with the slaughter of people who were part of the guerrillas’ ‘civilian support mechanisms.’

U.S. intelligence agencies continued to pick up evidence of these government-sponsored massacres. One CIA report in February 1982 described an army sweep through the so-called Ixil Triangle in central El Quiche province.

‘The commanding officers of the units involved have been instructed to destroy all towns and villages which are cooperating with the Guerrilla Army of the Poor [the EGP] and eliminate all sources of resistance,’ the report said. ‘Since the operation began, several villages have been burned to the ground, and a large number of guerrillas and collaborators have been killed.’

The CIA report explained the army’s modus operandi: ‘When an army patrol meets resistance and takes fire from a town or village, it is assumed that the entire town is hostile and it is subsequently destroyed.’ When the army encountered an empty village, it was ‘assumed to have been supporting the EGP, and it is destroyed. There are hundreds, possibly thousands of refugees in the hills with no homes to return to…

The army high command is highly pleased with the initial results of the sweep operation, and believes that it will be successful in destroying the major EGP support area and will be able to drive the EGP out of the Ixil Triangle… The well documented belief by the army that the entire Ixil Indian population is pro-EGP has created a situation in which the army can be expected to give no quarter to combatants and non-combatants alike.’

On Feb. 2, 1982, Richard Childress, one of Reagan’s national security aides, wrote a ‘secret’ memo to his colleagues summing up this reality on the ground:

‘As we move ahead on our approach to Latin America, we need to consciously address the unique problems posed by Guatemala. Possessed of some of the worst human rights records in the region… it presents a policy dilemma for us. The abysmal human rights record makes it, in its present form, unworthy of USG [U.S. government] support…

Beset by a continuous insurgency for at least 15 years, the current leadership is completely committed to a ruthless and unyielding program of suppression. Hardly a soldier could be found that has not killed a ‘guerrilla.’

The Rise of Rios Montt

However, Reagan remained committed to supplying military hardware to Guatemala’s brutal regime. So, the administration welcomed Gen. Efrain Rios Montt’s March 1982 overthrow of the thoroughly bloodstained Gen. Lucas.

An avowed fundamentalist Christian, Rios Montt impressed Official Washington where the Reagan administration immediately revved up its propaganda machinery to hype the new dictator’s 'born-again' status as proof of his deep respect for human life. Reagan hailed Rios Montt as 'a man of great personal integrity.'

By July 1982, however, Rios Montt had begun a new scorched-earth campaign called his 'rifles and beans' policy. The slogan meant that pacified Indians would get 'beans,' while all others could expect to be the target of army “rifles.” In October, Rios Montt secretly gave carte blanche to the feared 'Archivos' intelligence unit to expand 'death squad' operations in the cities. Based at the Presidential Palace, the 'Archivos' masterminded many of Guatemala’s most notorious assassinations.

The U.S. embassy was soon hearing more accounts of the army conducting Indian massacres, but ideologically driven U.S. diplomats fed the Reagan administration the propaganda spin that would be best for their careers. On Oct. 22, 1982, embassy staff dismissed the massacre reports as communist-inspired 'disinformation campaign,' concluding that 'that a concerted disinformation campaign is being waged in the U.S. against the Guatemalan government by groups supporting the communist insurgency in Guatemala.'

Reagan personally joined this P.R. campaign seeking to discredit human rights investigators and others who were reporting accurately about massacres that the administration knew, all too well, were true.

On Dec. 4, 1982, after meeting with Rios Montt, Reagan hailed the general as 'totally dedicated to democracy' and added that Rios Montt’s government had been 'getting a bum rap' on human rights. Reagan discounted the mounting reports of hundreds of Maya villages being eradicated.

In February 1983, however, a secret CIA cable noted a rise in 'suspect right-wing violence' with kidnappings of students and teachers. Bodies of victims were appearing in ditches and gullies. CIA sources traced these political murders to Rios Montt’s order to the 'Archivos' in October to 'apprehend, hold, interrogate and dispose of suspected guerrillas as they saw fit.'

Despite these grisly facts on the ground, the annual State Department human rights survey praised the supposedly improved human rights situation in Guatemala. 'The overall conduct of the armed forces had improved by late in the year' 1982, the report stated.

A different picture, far closer to the secret information held by the U.S. government, was coming from independent human rights investigators. On March 17, 1983, Americas Watch condemned the Guatemalan army for human rights atrocities against the Indian population.

New York attorney Stephen L. Kass said these findings included proof that the government carried out 'virtually indiscriminate murder of men, women and children of any farm regarded by the army as possibly supportive of guerrilla insurgents.'

Rural women suspected of guerrilla sympathies were raped before execution, Kass said, adding that children were 'thrown into burning homes. They are thrown in the air and speared with bayonets. We heard many, many stories of children being picked up by the ankles and swung against poles so their heads are destroyed.' [AP, March 17, 1983]

The president could not have been more justified when he condemned ‘the evil scourge of terrorism.’ I am quoting Ronald Reagan, who came into office in 1981 declaring that a focus of his foreign policy would be state-directed international terrorism, ‘the plague of the modern age’ and ‘a return to barbarism in our time,’ to sample some of the rhetoric of his administration. When George W. Bush declared a ‘war on terror’ 20 years later, he was redeclaring the war, an important fact that is worth exhuming from Orwell's memory hole if we hope to understand the nature of the evil scourge of terrorism, or more importantly, if we hope to understand ourselves. We do not need the famous Delphi inscription to recognize that there can be no more important task. Just as a personal aside, that critical necessity was forcefully brought home to me almost 70 years ago in my first encounter with Erich Fromm's work, in his classic essay on the escape to freedom in the modern world, and the grim paths that the modern free individual was tempted to choose in the effort to escape the loneliness and anguish that accompanied the newly-discovered freedom -- matters all too pertinent today, unfortunately.

The reasons why Reagan's war on terror has been dispatched to the repository of unwelcome facts are understandable and informative -- about ourselves. Instantly, Reagan's war on terror became a savage terrorist war, leaving hundreds of thousands of tortured and mutilated corpses in the wreckage of Central America, tens of thousands more in the Middle East, and an estimated 1.5 million killed by South African terror that was strongly supported by the Reagan administration in violation of congressional sanctions. All of these murderous exercises of course had pretexts. The resort to violence always does. In the Middle East, Reagan's decisive support for Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which killed some 15-20,000 people and destroyed much of southern Lebanon and Beirut, was based on the pretense that it was in selfdefense against PLO rocketing of the Galilee, a brazen fabrication: Israel recognized at once that the threat was PLO diplomacy, which might have undermined Israel's illegal takeover of the occupied territories. In Africa, support for the marauding of the apartheid state was officially justified within the framework of the war on terror: it was necessary to protect white South Africa from one of the world's ‘more notorious terrorist groups,’ Nelson Mandela's African National Congress, so Washington determined in 1988. The pretexts in the other cases were no more impressive.

For the most part, the victims of Reaganite terror were defenseless civilians, but in one case the victim was a state, Nicaragua, which could respond through legal channels. Nicaragua brought its charges to the World Court, which condemned the US for ‘unlawful use of force’ -- in lay terms, international terrorism -- in its attack on Nicaragua from its Honduran bases, and ordered the US to terminate the assault and pay substantial reparations. The aftermath is instructive.

Congress responded to the Court judgment by increasing aid to the US-run mercenary army attacking Nicaragua, while the press condemned the Court as a ‘hostile forum’ and therefore irrelevant. The same Court had been highly relevant a few years earlier when it ruled in favor of the US against Iran. Washington dismissed the Court judgment with contempt. In doing so, it joined the distinguished company of Libya's Qaddafi and Albania's Enver Hoxha. Libya and Albania have since joined the world of law-abiding states in this respect, so now the US stands in splendid isolation. Nicaragua then brought the matter to the UN Security Council, which passed two resolutions calling on all states to observe international law. The resolutions were vetoed by the US, with the assistance of Britain and France, which abstained. All of this passed virtually without notice, and has been expunged (gewist. svh) from history.

Also forgotten -- or rather, never noticed -- is the fact that the ‘hostile forum’ had bent over backwards to accommodate Washington. The Court rejected almost all of Nicaragua's case, presented by a distinguished Harvard University international lawyer, on the grounds that when the US had accepted World Court jurisdiction in 1946, it added a reservation exempting itself from charges under international treaties, specifically the Charters of the United Nations and the Organization of American States. Accordingly, the US is self-entitled to carry out aggression and other crimes that are far more serious than international terrorism. The Court correctly recognized this exemption, one aspect of much broader issues of sovereignty and global dominance that I will put aside…

The audacity of Reaganite terrorism was as impressive as its scale. To select only one example, for which events in Germany provided a pretext, in April 1986 the US Air Force bombed Libya, killing dozens of civilians. To add a personal note, on the day of the bombing, at about 6:30 pm, I received a phone call from Tripoli from the Mideast correspondent of ABC TV, Charles Glass, an old friend. He advised me to watch the 7pm TV news. In 1986, all the TV channels ran their major news programs at 7pm. I did so, and exactly at 7, agitated news anchors switched to their facilities in Libya so that they could present, live, the US bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi, the first bombing in history enacted for prime time TV -- no slight logistical feat: the bombers were denied the right to cross France and had to take a long detour over the Atlantic to arrive just in time for the evening news. After showing the exciting scenes of the cities in flames, the TV channels switched to Washington, for sober discussion of how the US was defending itself from Libyan terror, under the newly devised doctrine of ‘selfdefense against future attack.’ Officials informed the country that they had certain knowledge that Libya had carried out a bombing of a disco in Berlin a few days earlier in which a US soldier had been killed. The certainty reduced to zero shortly after, as quietly conceded well after its purpose had been served. And it would have been hard to find even a raised eyebrow about the idea that the disco bombing would have justified the murderous assault on Libyan civilians.

The media were also polite enough not to notice the curious timing. Commentators were entranced by the solidity of the non-existent evidence and Washington's dedication to law. In a typical reaction, the NYT editors explained that ‘even the most scrupulous citizen can only approve and applaud the American attacks on Libya the United States has prosecuted [Qaddafi] carefully, proportionately -- and justly,’ the evidence for Libyan responsibility for the disco bombing has been ‘now laid out clearly to the public,’ and ‘then came the jury, the European governments to which the United States went out of its way to send emissaries to share evidence and urge concerted action against the Libyan leader.’ Entirely irrelevant is that no credible evidence was laid out and that the ‘jury’ was quite skeptical, particularly in Germany itself, where intensive investigation had found no evidence at all; or that the jury was calling on the executioner to refrain from any action.

The bombing of Libya was neatly timed for a congressional vote on aid to the US-run terrorist force attacking Nicaragua. To ensure that the timing would not be missed, Reagan made the connection explicit. In an address the day after the bombing Reagan said: ‘I would remind the House [of Representatives] voting this week that this arch-terrorist [Qaddafi] has sent $400 million and an arsenal of weapons and advisers into Nicaragua to bring his war home to the United States. He has bragged that he is helping the Nicaraguans because they fight America on its own ground’ -- namely America's own ground in Nicaragua. The idea that the ‘mad dog’ was bringing his war home to us by providing arms to a country we were attacking with a CIA-run terrorist army based in our Honduran dependency was a nice touch, which did not go unnoticed. As the national press explained, the bombing of Libya should ‘strengthen President Reagan's hand in dealing with Congress on issues like the military budget and aid to Nicaraguan ‘contras.’

This is only a small sample of Reagan's contributions to international terrorism. The most lasting among them was his enthusiastic organization of the jihadi movement in Afghanistan. The reasons were explained by the CIA station chief in Islamabad, who directed the project. In his words, the goal was to ‘kill Soviet Soldiers,’ a ‘noble goal’ that he ‘loved,’ as did his boss in Washington. He also emphasized that ‘the mission was not to liberate Afghanistan’ -- and in fact it may have delayed Soviet withdrawal, some specialists believe. With his unerring instinct for favoring the most violent criminals, Reagan selected for lavish aid Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, famous for throwing acid in the faces of young women in Kabul and now a leader of the insurgents in Afghanistan, though perhaps he may soon join the other warlords of the western-backed government, current reports suggest. Reagan also lent strong support to the worst of Pakistan's dictators, Zia ul-Haq, helping him to develop his nuclear weapons program and to carry out his Saudi-funded project of radical Islamization of Pakistan. There is no need to dwell on the legacy for these tortured countries and the world.

Apart from Cuba, the plague of state terror in the Western hemisphere was initiated with the Brazilian coup in 1964, installing the first of a series of neo-Nazi National Security States and initiating a plague of repression without precedent in the hemisphere, always strongly backed by Washington, hence a particularly violent form of state-directed international terrorism. The campaign was in substantial measure a war against the Church. It was more than symbolic that it culminated in the assassination of six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, in November 1989, a few days after the fall of the Berlin wall. They were murdered by an elite Salvadoran battalion, fresh from renewed training at the John F. Kennedy Special Forces School in North Carolina. As was learned last November, but apparently aroused no interest, the order for the assassination was signed by the chief of staff and his associates, all of them so closely connected to the Pentagon and the US Embassy that it becomes even harder to imagine that Washington was unaware of the plans of its model battalion. This elite force had already left a trail of blood of the usual victims through the hideous decade of the 1980s in El Salvador, which opened with the assassination of Archbishop Romero, ‘the voice of the voiceless,’ by much the same hands.

Contra drug links included… payments to drug traffickers by the U.S. State Department of funds authorized by the Congress for humanitarian assistance to the Contras... There was substantial evidence of drug smuggling through the war zones... Senior U.S. policy makers were not immune to the idea that drug money was a perfect solution tot the Contra's funding problems.' Het probleem was namelijk dat de regering Reagan deze terroristen buiten het uitdrukkelijk verbod van het Congres in het geheim financierden, onder andere via de cocaïnehandel.

Americas Watch, charged that 'the contras systematically engage in violent abuses.' It also concludes that rebel violations of the laws of war are 'so prevalent that these may be said to be their principal means of waging war.' It accused the Contras of: